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Student Experience Blog

Playing House

Mon, Jan 13, 2014

It is the second week of the Winter Semester and things are getting pretty interesting. I am pretty sure we all loved playing house when we were young and even though it is slightly different depending on cultures and geography, playing house was fun and it still is.

I registered for the Acting Fundamentals class with Joe Golden this semester and I have never had this much fun in class. The first thing we had to do was act out a script with very little dialogue. I don't think anyone understands what this does to one's imagination. For my first scene, I was thinking about being in the mafia and what I would do to act like one, my accent, my body movement, what outfit I would wear and a whole lot of other details I would incorporate to make it believable. We had unlimited options for the script because it was not too detailed in order to allow space for creativity.

The scene I had to prepare for next was called "Not Some Fairytale." For this scene, I was to be addressed as Cleopatra but following a storyline tweaked from Cinderella using a broken glass slipper as our prop. I liken these exercises to playing house because it's creating a story out of nothing essentially and going along with that while trying to make it look and sound believable. It is also fun and engaging because the rest of the class has to provide a response on what they thought the story being told was. The interpretations of the scenes are sometimes very different and it is interesting to see how people can look at the very same thing but interpret it in many different ways. It is also more interesting that we cannot say any other person's interpretation is wrong because they provide very valid reasons why they thought the way they did.

I remember playing house when I was younger and I loved being a doctor or a teacher so we would hold meetings, either save sick people or just go on and teach about things I didn't even understand. I love the PEAK system because I never would have imagined taking an acting class. Thankfully, this class is a requirement for Speech Rhetoric, which is one of my minors, and I get to take classes that teach me how to formulate and defend my opinion. In addition to that, I am getting less nervous when I have to act out a scene, so the course in general is amazing for public speaking. I am looking forward to more activities in Acting Fundamentals and to creating more crazy stories. Perhaps I will be a super hero instead of a bad guy in one of the scenes. Who knows, I could be whatever I want.

P.S. Apologies for my art, I should probably take a drawing class next.

- Kenny

Keneuoe Mphutlane is a sophomore International Political Economy major and is from Lesotho.